"However often you may have done them a favour, if you once refuse they forget everything except your refusal."
"Let us strive the more earnestly therefore to lengthen out our span of life-- life that is poured out like water and falls as the leaf-- if not by action (the means to which lie in another's power), yet in any case by study and research; and since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived."
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Source: Pliny (the Younger) (1807). “The Letters of Pliny the Consul: With Occasional Remarks”, p.195
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